Ennio Quirino Visconti

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Ennio Quirino Visconti by Théophile Auguste Vauchelet, Oil on canvas, 1802, Musee Carnavalet, Musee de la Ville de Paris.

Ennio Quirino Visconti (November 1, 1751 - February 7, 1818) was an Italian antiquarian and art historian, papal Prefect of Antiquities, and the leading expert of his day in the field of ancient Roman sculpture.

Born in Rome, he was the son of Giovanni Battista Antonio Visconti (1722–1784), the curator of Clement XIV, who reorganised and restored the papal collection of antiquities, as the Museo Pio-Clementina.

The brilliant^[1] Visconti took up his father's position as conservator of the Capitoline Museums in Rome; his catalogue of the Roman sculpture and antiquities in the Vatican collections, published in the course of many years, "made an impact on archaeological studies second only to that of Winckelmann.^[2] He also published the sculptures in the Villa Borghese, 1796. In 1798, he became consul of the short-lived Roman Republic. With the restoration of papal control in Rome had to emigrate to Paris, where at the end of 1799 he became curator of antiquities of the Musée Napoleon housed in the Louvre, many of which were familiar to him as booty removed under the stipulations of the Treaty of Tolentino (1796); in 1803 he was made professor at the Institut de France.

Though Visconti was firmly grounded in the antiquarian traditions of connoisseurship, which rated associative values high, in portraits and assumed portraits of the great—both philosopohers and emperors— and though he concentrated on disentangling the iconography of the sculptures and reliefs he was describing, Visconti is also a liminal figure at the beginnings of modern art history, as when, Haskell and Penny note, he concedes that he has perhaps overestimated the beauty of a statue in his delight at recognising in it the portrait of Phocion.^[3] His sense of loyalty to the sculpture he had grown up with induced him to see in the best of these copies of classical Greek and Hellenistic originals, such as the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoön, "perfected imitations" made for Roman collectors of taste, and that the traditions of ancient sculpture were a cumulative history of improvements, rather as Virgil, it was felt, refined and improved upon Homer.

[edit] Works

Museo Pio-Clementino
Sculture del Palazzo della Villa Borghese della Pinciana brevemente desritte 2 vols. 1796.
Monumenti Scelti Borghesiani
Monumenti Gabini
Iconographia greca (as Iconographie grecque, Paris 1808)
First volume of Iconographie romaine (4 vol., 1817–26), finished by Antoine Mongez

These five works were reissued, with emendations, in Milan, 1818-37, some under the title Opere varie italiane e francesi edited by Giovanni Labus.

[edit] Notes

^ "Giambattista Visconti and his brilliant son" Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900 (Yale University Press) 1981:61.
^ Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900 (Yale University Press) 1981:61.
^ Visconti, Museo Pio-Clementino ii, pl. xlviii, noted by Haskell and Penny 1981:50.